Enlightening

Video by Sung-A Yoon
Edited for web by Branko Miliskovic
Music and spoken words belongs to other performances !Photo by Nemanja Ladjic

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ENLIGHTENING

Living installation/performanceDuration: 4 hoursVisitors: aprox. 100Trouble #6 Festival, The Non-Aligned 4×4, Les Halles, Brussels, BelgiumCurated by Jovana StokicThanks to Marina Abramovic InstituteSpecial thanks to Comité Olympique et Interfédéral BelgeMay 2nd, 2010Photographs by Nemanja Ladjic and Nicolaos ZafiriouVideo by Yoon Sung-A ENLIGHTENING
Instructions for the audience:
Performance will start at: 16h
Performance will be finished at: 20h
Duration: 4 hours
The audience is kindly asked to come onto the tribunes, take a seat or lie in a desired position, remain silent and wait for an Enlightenment. The audience may leave at any time or may stay until the end of performance.All electronic devices (cell phones, I-pods, laptops etc) must be switched off during the time of the performance. It is also not allowed to eat, drink or speak during the time spent in the performance.

Just relax and enjoy your journey through Enlightening

4×4 NON-ALIGNED
Four artists work simultaneously on the same form. All have worked with Marina Abramovic and are inspired by her notion of long-term performance.
“Non-aligned should not be understood here in the geopolitical sense but at a more abstract level: not belonging to the same alignment, or how, starting from the strongest individuality, a possibility of coexistence is established.”
4×4 NON-ALIGNED long duration performance by four artists for four hours curated by Jovana Stokic

Hwang Eunhye , Branko Miliskovic ,Declan Rooney ,Viola Yesiltac

The project 4×4: Non-Aligned is a hybrid form comprising of an exhibition of video works by four artists, and four independent live long-duration performances. My curatorial intervention consists of establishing the framework for four disparate artists working simultaneously on the same form – long-duration performance. I apply the notion of non-alignment not in its geo-political sense. Rather, I translate it into a more abstract sense of “not belonging to the same alignment, “ by emphasizing both artists’ strong individuality and the possibility mutual co-existence that enrich the viewing experience.The exhibition’s title ironically evokes the term “non-alignment,”coined by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during Cold-War world political climate in the 1950s when the Non-aligned movement was formed. Nehru described the five pillars to be used as a guide for Sino-Indian relations, which were first put forth by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Called Panchsheel (five restraints), these principles would later serve as the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement.The five principles were:Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty Mutual non-aggression Mutual non-interference in domestic affairs Equality and mutual benefit Peaceful co-existence By creating works in the globalised late capitalist art world today artists of course transcend the daily politics and interact with each others following rules similar to these five principles. This is the platform for the interaction of these four artists who come from different backgrounds and exhibit internationally: Hwang Eunhye, Branko Miliskovic, Declan Rooney, and Viola Yesiltac. All of the invited performance artists, who belong to the younger generation of artists working in this medium, are used to tour their performances in order to participate in different art projects in Europe, Asia and North America. This project wishes to investigate the ways artists respond to the particular cultural context they encounter in their art-touring practice. As these artists are able to stay in Brussels only for several days before their performances, they are put in a situation that the tourists, or touring entertainers, encounter in a new environment.Yet, their performances are devised not to represent them as inane strangers in an unknown place. They could be perceived as a delegates on a fantasy Non-Aligned Conference: they come to this festival with a similar agenda — to argue for their version of long-duration performances in front of a new audience.Legacy of Marina Abramovic The four artists who perform at Trouble #6 have all been influenced by the pioneer performance artist Marina Abramovic. They studied and worked closely with Abramovic. Theirs is a shared belief in a specific role of the performance art today. Abramovic started the archive at the Marina Abramovic Institute of the performance art in order to preserve the legacy of long-duration performance she practices, as well as to point to new visionary paths that performance art will take in the future in the works of young performance artists. To a constellation of art and politics today, Marina Abramovic offers a uniquely personal response. She is an artist interested not only in a particular political viewpoint, but in universal ethics. Abramovic’s notion of subjecthood and of compassion as its constituent, (as well as her art, which hopes to have a redemptive quality) is not in line with mainstream notion of a contemporary political artist. Her criticism of the world today is visual and visceral, and her spirituality is inclusive and ultimately humanist. These young performers share her hopefulness and a belief in the possibility of an ethical transformation via aesthetic experience.The idea is that an individual change can occur when artists provoke a personal transformative act during the very act of viewing. This can happen only if performances are observed during a long period of time that allow them to initiate a compassionate, transformative process. Marina Abramovic describes the importance of long duration in performance art: “The artist and public need time to enter a state of mind, and this state of mind can be achieved through repetition and the long duration of the piece. Every element and material becomes something else. You open the door and close it. That’s just opening and closing a door. But over hours, it becomes something else. It can take on another meaning.” The short stay of the young performance artists in Brussels should be yet another way of subtle transformations art can offer via long-duration performance.